Chuck Perkins is a favorite performer in New Orleans where he returned in 2002, and in Chicago where he lived for ten years. Chuck has preformed with former Poet Laureate Mark Strand, with Mark Smith creator of the Poetry Slam, and Umar Bin Hassan of The Last Poets. He has headlined at the Guild Complex in Chicago, with his most notable show in tribute to Gil Scott Heron. In early 2009 Chuck performed to a sell out crowd at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club backed by Antoine Drye, Donald Edwards, Kevin Ferrell, Leslie Harrison and Brian Lynch. He has been featured in poetry venues, high schools, and colleges around the country. His poetry appears in the best selling anthology Spoken Word Revolution. Chuck has performed with many New Orleans top musicians, including Donald Harrison, Henry Butler, Bill Summers, Nicholas Payton, Herlin Riley, Glen David Andrews, Dave Torkanowsky, and Shannon Powell to name a few. Chuck was featured in the French documentary N. O. Ballade, as well as two upcoming documentaries, Endangered Species and Tradition is a Temple. He created his Avante Guard Circus "Voices of the Big Easy" in 2004. It’s a broad panorama of New Orleans' rich musical and literary culture, fusing performances that are alternately passionate and whimsical, poignant and fun. The Voices of the Big Easy crew consist of, Chuck Perkins on words, Troy Sawyer on trumpet, Jesse Morrow on Bass, Julian Addison on drums, Wildman Ivory Holmes on congas, and Mardi Gras Indian Spy Boy Honey. Voices have performed in some of New Orleans' best musical venues.  A Love Song For Nola is Chuck’s follow up CD to A Bucket of Questions. Love Song was selected by the Times Picayune’s music critic Keith Spera as being one of the best CD releases of 2008. Voices of the Big Easy had its first international performance at the Banlieues Bleues Blues festival of Paris in February of 2009. Chuck ended 2009 with performances in Manchester and Liverpool. 


Keene Kopper (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Cum Laude) has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2009, previously residing in Brooklyn, New York. His experience as a design architect in New York encouraged him to explore beyond the realm of the concrete, inhabitable environment. His art work typically involves alien or very sparse landscapes. Diminutive scenes of Edenic color and shape fields contrast bland expansive environments. Lighting is a significant aspect to his work weather the piece is a photographed set, an interactive, “functional” installation or video. Dramatic, either very warm or very cold lighting is used to light the scenes. He sites Dieter Roth, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Will Alsop architecture and Richard D. James as influences in his work 

Two workshops are being offered;

~ Intensive:  Sunday, March 14, 10am-5pm with a 1 hour break from 1pm-2pm

$100/ ($85 for students)

~ In Brief:  Sunday, March 14, 10am-1pm; or Monday, March 15, 6pm-9pm

$55 / ($45 for students)

The class is limited to 10 participants per class so early registration is imperative. 

Email:  Reese Johanson

Reviews of Decade at a Glance from the New York production:
 

The Connecticut Post review by Joe Meyers

Are the 1930s the past and the future?

Just a few years ago, the gripping theater piece “Decade at a Glance” by Joan Evans would probably have felt harrowing but distant.

After all, Evans uses the Great Depression era photos of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans (below) as the starting point for a theatrical examination of the impact of the financial apocalypse on Midwest farmers in the 1930s.

The loss of money and work and hope would be moving in any period, but at this particular moment — when we might still be on the edge of a global financial abyss — “Decade at a Glance” has the scary feel of history repeating itself.

Evans combines dance and drama and vintage tunes for a piece that only runs about an hour, but which will leave you with more to think about than the average play that is twice as long.

“Decade at a Glance” is a co-production of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and the Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre. The show is being presented at the Adler studio through March 7 in a very intimate space that heightens the drama and the emotional impact of the material.

The piece begins in a city (presumably New York) where the ensemble sings a mordant version of “We’re in the Money,” dressed in ragged overcoats.

Evans and the cast quickly fill us in on the Franklin Roosevelt programs that put lots of urban people back to work (including artists like Lange and Evans who were hired by the federal government to travel the country photographing victims of the Depression).

The relief programs were focused mostly on the urban areas of the two coasts, however. The problems in the middle of the country actually got worse in the 1930s as poverty increased and climate changes devastated the area (i.e., the notorious dust storms that destroyed crops and killed farm animals).

For many of these Middle Americans, the only two choices were to starve where they were or to scrape a few bucks together and head out to California (the journey in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”).

“Decade at a Glance” features a wonderful ensemble of young actors, most of whom are recent graduates of acting schools around the city.

The company works together so tightly that it would unfair to single one or two of them out. The actors are: Lizzi Albert, Laura Carbonell, Erika Cazeneuve, Annie Chang, Aidan Koehler, Gaja Massaro, Rafa Miguel, Tommy Nelms, Sean Powell, Lulu Rossbacher, Melanie Siegel, Margaux Susi, Elise Toscano, Cythnia Vasquez and Sarah Wharton.

At $18 a ticket — students are only $5 — this is one of the great New York theater bargains of the moment. For more information, go to www.stellaadler.com.

Decade at a Glance is an exhuberant, humorous and joyous ensemble piece that tells the story of the Great Depression of the 1930's through music and dance.  While it's inspired by sources directly from the period, it successfully goes beyond them to create its own new artistic whole, because, I think, it's fired by personal, creative compassion for the struggles for better lives of those it depicts, viewed through a hopeful and affirmative lens.

Decade draws on photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange (compare the production photo below with Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother"), songs of Woody Guthrie and others, and for its text, passages from James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as well as published interviews of the period -- an immediately fascinating idea that works beautifully.  It follows the story of the Oakies, who lost their farms in the center of our country to the dustbowls and banks (with a spirited rendition of "Jolly Banker" by Woody Guthrie) and set out in dilapidated trucks to create new lives in California.  As migrant laborers picking California's bounty of produce, they encountered brutality and prejudice (Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" with an ironic twist). 

The choreographed ensemble creation of a jam-full open truck with a Conestoga wagon-like covering, its stressed engine puffing and spitting to make it over the mountains, is wonderful.

In focusing on the rural story of the Oakies, the narrative essentially parallels that of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, a point that should have been mentioned in the program, even if no specific text was taken from it.  Decade also casts a glance at the urban story -- early on the ensemble constructs a choreographed sky scraper with a tumbling suicide, and a cast member sings "Brother can you spare a Dime" by Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney -- a song so powerful that if anything of art can alter how one thinks and acts, this can.

The attempt to take on both the rural and urban story is ambitious.  I missed somewhat a central focus on an individual or family, but Decade is comprehensive and kaleidoscopic, and the music, choreography, and talent of the performers, students at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting -- all acting, singing, dancing, and with some playing musical instruments -- surround one and altogether carry it through.  The Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre seeks "to create vital and visceral performance work that responds to our world and has meaning for our lives."  Decade at a Glance  is a moving and exciting all-over expression of a significant time in the American experience.

Decade at a Glance, presented by Stella Adler Studio of Acting and The Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre, in association with Interaction Arts Foundation, plays at the Stella Adler Studio on West 27th Street in NYC February 11-13, 17-19, March 6-7.   In March it will move on to play in New Orleans.

Greta Turken writes:

Creator, choreographer, director Joan Evans slips a company of wonderful young actors behind the haunted eyes, gnarled hands and dust streaked children's faces familiar from the photos of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. These eyes of Dustbowlers gaze out at us, and a group of people like us but different comes to life. They tell us what happened with all they've got: their voices, their songs, the instruments they carry, the movements in concert that make up their days, words they spoke then for us to hear now.

Decade at a Glance sets indelible camera images into motion free of a set, with an ensemble of bodies tuned like waving wheat. The tribal glue that held migrant groups together is matched in this ensemble's high wire finesse. The thrift it took for the Dustbowlers to survive is met in the spare elegance of Evans's vision. In a world of pleasures kissed goodbye, music is indispensable as food and air - or how could they play like that? You'll get charming spoken musical duos, solo arias and harmonies that bring tears to your eyes. Plus, the solemnest hoedown and meanest banker you'll ever see together in one place. The group's means of transportation is ingenious, then sorry, then blackly hilarious. Evans wrings humor from a brutal life. Great beauty happens before you - and none of it is pretty. True as it was for the Dustbowl families, there's no place here for fuss. This brings us to the feat of acting: delivered without sympathy - rarely seen, pure gesture with nothing extra, words spoken as plainly as their speakers would have spoken them, enough to turn a watcher's heart inside out and give chills up the spine - unbelievably hard to do, yet achieved under the consummate direction of Joan Evans.

Come see it. You'll feel better about everything.

 


Chuck Perkins Reviewed

Turn on the TV, pick up a paper or bury yourself in blogs if you want. The real news from New Orleans comes from guys like Chuck Perkins — sometimes over a cup of coffee at Rose Nicaud but best of all rapped, chanted and sung to beats of African drums, with a trumpet or tambourine or such as color commentator. Voices of the Big easy honors ancestors, skewers presidents and mayors, nods to neighbors, and never lies: You can't make this stuff up, anyway. Chuck wouldn't want to. Swung in rhythm, his prose packs the wallop of truth.  
-Larry Blumenfeld, editor-at-large Jazziz magazine 

It is said that New Orleans holds more raw talent than any other city… Chuck Perkins is certainly one of them! He began making his voice heard by tearing off the straitjacket of anthology poetry and verbalizing what was happening in him and around him, in the great African-American tradition of Watts Prophets, the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron… To uncover the psyche of the city, he draws together a prodigious assembly of strengths and presences: jazz, blues, Indian Mardi Gras funk… Crucial! 
Nouveau Paris Ile-de-France’s Banlieues Bleues selection of the week. 

A voice of rage and reason, memory and melody, Chuck Perkins is a distinct element on the New Orleans literary performance scene.

Chris Rose, Times Picayune 

Perkins brings his urgency, fluency, intelligence, street smarts and sense of drama as well as humor to his new cd “ A Love Song for Nola”.  Perkins knows his subjects well. He’s not looking in from the outside but speaking from within the warmth and eccentricities of the New Orleans music community.

Geraldine Wyckoff, Louisiana Weekly 

To spend an evening with Chuck Perkins and Voices of the Big Easy is to experience the uniqueness of what New Orleans offers. Perkins is known as a poet or spoken word performer. He has taken poetry slam to a new level.

Anita Oubre, New Orleans Tribune 

Keith Spera voted “ A Love Song for Nola” one of the best New Orleans cd releases of 2008.

Keith Spera, music critic Times Picayune


Chuck Perkins Performing Live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DsPn7dLie4 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKWvhgETy_k&feature=related 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTm_SYja6Kg&feature=related